It's Memorial Day weekend, the kickoff of the summer vacation season, the summer driving season. And if $4 gasoline wasn't stifling business enough in the summer-tourist enclave of Show Low, AZ, there was a freak snowstorm, as well. Well, those Phoenicians from "the Valley" come up here to cool off, don't they?

I was disappointed to wake up and find that Arizona's summer snowstorm had only deposited two inches. Maybe Al Gore is right, after all. Of course we are parked at a lowly 6500 feet, and the snowline is closer to 7000 feet.



I ran the catalytic heater all night. That only happens a couple times per year, usually in the winter. It was indeed a three dog night, and I only have two dogs to sleep with.

As entertaining as this experience was, it doesn't take long to get cabin fever living in a small travel trailer with two dogs. Non-RVers must wonder how we full time RVers can survive for long in such limited space. It's because our minds are outside the box, literally. It's the outside world that matters, and when you have good weather 95% of the time, the outside world is large. When you are boondocking by yourself on public lands the world is vast.

When my relatives came by, on their way to Phoenix, I was disappointed that the restaurant was below the snowline by a few feet. But it was cold. I was suddenly self-conscious of my winter coat being as old as my nephew. It gets worn at least in the morning nine months per year.

Maybe I shouldn't complain. How many things last over twenty years? In fact I was here in Show Low to pick up a replacement solar controller that had lasted all of two years, which is my average with anything electronic.

A couple years ago one of my three solar panels had croaked. The dealer who sold me the panels no longer dealt with BP Solar. Val-U Solar in nearby Snowflake, AZ came to my rescue. I have given them my solar business ever since. (This is an unpaid ad.)

So that's how this bizarre "Arizona snow in summer" story ends: by driving on a rare cloudy day, through Snowflake, AZ, to pick up solar equipment, on my way to Utah, where license plates proclaim "The Best Snow on Earth."

Thinking about the snow reminded me of the satisfaction that I had last year in staying in northern New Mexico, where modest winter snowfall results in a May and June landscape that is free of melting snowbanks, mud and mosquitoes, which is what you get in the high country of UT or CO.

While I thought about that, the Mobile Kodger, parking nearby, was cogitating where he would spend the rest of the summer.